Monthly Archives: February 2011

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This Friday, March 4th Berwick Fields will be participating in Clean Up Australia Day. This year grade 5/6 will be helping out by cleaning at Sweeney Reserve. Every student has walking permission for the day (as per the student enrolment form) and will be using gloves and tongs. Could you please ensure your child has their hat for the day and sunscreen if required. Thank you for your support!

On Sunday, March 6th there will be more Clean Up Australia Day activities in our area. If you’re interested in doing more to care for our environment, please have a look at this link.

Participating in Clean Up Australia Day is a great chance for us to give to our community and another way Berwick Fields demonstrates care for our environment.

As a part of our maths groups, we have been learning about decimal numbers and their place value. This has included ordering and rounding them. Below is a game to help practise ordering decimal numbers. Choose the activity you want to complete from the main menu, and then order the countries in order from first to last place. Simply click on the flag then click the position number they need to be placed in. Good luck!

Over the past fortnight in class we have been looking at developing our understanding of persuasive writing. We started to explore what persuasive writing is by using Jenny Eather’s ‘Writing Fun’ website.

Our big focus this week was on backing up the arguments that we make using lots of evidence. Rather than writing whole pieces, we have been working to create plans for a lot of different topics and coming up with evidence to support the arguments we think of. The ‘Persuasion Map’ from ReadWriteThink has been very useful in supporting us to do this.

After working on quite a few plans during the week, we sat down on Friday to make a plan for the topic ‘Do we really need a school library?’. We had to come up with arguments to convince Mr Wigney whether to keep it open, or close it down to save money. Below is an example of one of our arguments, and the way we used evidence to support it.

Check out some more of our plans below! After we created our plans, we set about writing our persuasive piece. It was amazing to see the impact that our focus on planning the writing has had on the writing we produced. Everyone had really well supported arguments compared to our writing of a fortnight ago. Keep an eye out later in the week when we will publish some of our completed writing pieces.

Below is a recount ofthe team captains ‘Sailability’ excursion to Lysterfield on Wednesday, written by Britney in 56A.

Today at Sailability all of the Team Captains went to Lysterfield Lake Park in Narre Warren North. We did lots of activities and learnt lots from Captain Eric about being a fantastic leader.

My two favourite things about the day were sailing with Crystal on a purple yacht and playing the rescue game with the mats. In our yacht we went really well and we sailed quite quickly out really far. There were a few times where our boat was at a dead stop. The only not so good thing was that there were heaps of bees in the water and one came into our dingy and caused us to seriously panic. We didn’t get stuck at all which was pretty good. During the last 15 – 20 minutes Crystal and I got into the speed boat with the man everybody called ‘Bee Catcher’ because he was so good around them and whenever one flew onto people he would come and get rid of them.

Captain Eric taught us a lot about taking action as a leader and the whole day we focussed on the word ‘ASK’ standing for: A = Attitude, S = Skills, K = Knowledge. He also taught us about acting as a leader and not reacting. He had a lot of fun little games to do and some sand art.

The two funny things to me were pushing each other around on billy carts and when Crystal, Jemma and I had to go and rescue Dylan and Elijah on the speed boat because they lost control of their dinghy and it got stuck in the water reeds. They were waiting there for so long that when we finally got to them they were relaxing with their feet up on the boat.

On Friday morning we continued our Interschool Sports training with Year 9 students from Kambrya helping us out with training drills. Our sports for the winter season are kickball, soccer, football, netball and t-ball. Our first match will take place on Friday, May 13.